Saudi Arabia’s patience with Iran is over

Prince Mohammed has warned Tehran will face dire consequences over its meddling

Very rarely does Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the deputy crown prince and defence minister of Saudi Arabia, speak as forcefully and as publicly as he did this week. In a wide-ranging television interview, it was clear his patience with Iran had come to an end. Prince Mohammed was putting the Islamic Republic on notice: if Tehran does not change its behaviour, the consequences will be severe.

Prince Mohammed went further than any Saudi Arabian leader in recent history and threatened to take the fight into Iran itself. “We are not waiting until there becomes a battle in Saudi Arabia,” he said. If there was to be a battle, he said it was better that it was “a battle for them in Iran and not in Saudi Arabia”.

These are forceful words and they will resonate in many capitals across the Gulf – and farther afield. The expansionism and interference of Iran’s leaders has been a running theme for far too many years. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has sought to use subterfuge to destablise the Middle East, all the while caging the aspirations of its own population and wrapping its political aims in religious dogma.

In every conflict one looks at in the region, the hand of Iran can be detected, and nowhere is its interference positive. Iran’s leaders have dragged its people to a parlous position, locked in a pariah state with a theocratic government, more concerned with the acquisition of the world’s worst weapons than with the life chances of its people. Instead of focusing its energies on seeking to destabilise the countries of the Gulf – richer, more modern, more developed than anywhere in Iran – Tehran ought to look inwards.

The essence of the problem, as Prince Mohammed identified, is Tehran’s extremist ideology. When he says Iran wants to “dominate the Muslim world”, he is not exaggerating. Tehran would march on the capitals of the Arab world if it could; instead it seeks to dominate through spreading extremism, terrorism and a warped ideology.

Prince Mohammed has been as clear as he can be. The security of the Gulf is not negotiable. The Gulf does not want a long war, in Yemen or elsewhere. But it is prepared for one. If Tehran does not change, then Saudi Arabia will ensure that the battle Tehran wants to export across the Middle East finds it way back inside Iran’s own borders.